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A thread for nitpicking about movies/tv shows


Larry Rydell

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If you're a Bill Burr fan, this is the "Get out of the pool!" thing x100. Just hilarious and heavy-handed.

"Wash your hair, motherfucker."

The ones that kill me are action movies where guys blast through walls when fighting. A good example is the Rock spearing that pole down during the big gunfight in The Rundown. Also, Bane punching a hole in that concrete pillar during the final fight of The Dark Knight Rises.

If I'm watching the T-1000 shove Arnold through a concrete wall, sure thing. He's a metal robot. But two dudes made of bones and skin, come on. It takes me out of the movie a little bit.

On a related note, too much wire work during fight scenes. One guy punches another and sends him sailing 40 yards, airborne. If it's The Matrix, sure; The Expendables, no.

 

 

Agreed.  Fighting in movies and TV is pro wrestling 10 punch in the corner level dumb.  One-punch knockouts exist only when the plot calls for it.  Otherwise, dudes just wail on each other and there's usually never evidence of damage later.  Not even a  black eye.

 

Don't even get me started on gunplay, where everybody should be fucking deaf by now.

 

 

I always chuckle when I see characters in zombie movies using handguns and popping off headshots from 75 yards away like it's nothing. And it's usually not a character that's a trained marksman or in the military. It's some Joe Schmoe everyman or Suzy Housewife who likely has never picked up a gun before in their lives. There's a scene in The Walking Dead where either Carol or Lori is in a guard tower with what looked like a snub nosed revolver shooting zombies in the prison yard and they score multiple headshots.

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Oh, man. THE WALKING DEAD is the worst ever when it comes to all that headshot bullshit. People are constantly running around, firing wild, clearly unaimed shots and scoring headshot after headshot.

Zombies are absurdly easy to kill on that show. You have to be a fucking idiot to get killed.

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Oh Jesus Christ The Walking Dead.  I like the show but holy fuck the gun shit is terrible.  EVA just beat me to it but yeah, you have people hitting:

 

  1. Perfect headshots
  2. While running
  3. One handed
  4. With no previous training before the zombie apocalypse started

 

Any one of those is difficult.  Add up all four?  Yeah...

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Oh, man. THE WALKING DEAD is the worst ever when it comes to all that headshot bullshit. People are constantly running around, firing wild, clearly unaimed shots and scoring headshot after headshot.

Zombies are absurdly easy to kill on that show. You have to be a fucking idiot to get killed.

 

1) The real monsters of the show are the human beings, not the zombies.

 

2) The zombies are a credible threat.   They don't sleep, are always on the move, and there are a millions of them lurking about.  Killing one or two at a time doesn't even put a dent in their numbers. 

 

3) You are living in a post-holocaust world.   You have to work a lot harder to survive than the zombies do.

 

As for the fearless undead killers thing goes, yeah, it escapes me how normal people suddenly develop combat training and steely reserve in the face of the zombie horde.   When the shit goes down, no one pisses their pants in fear and never miss a headshot.

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Oh Jesus Christ The Walking Dead.  I like the show but holy fuck the gun shit is terrible.  EVA just beat me to it but yeah, you have people hitting:

 

  1. Perfect headshots
  2. While running
  3. One handed
  4. With no previous training before the zombie apocalypse started

 

Any one of those is difficult.  Add up all four?  Yeah...

 

 

There's a scene in the episode where the farm is on fire where Maggie is driving around the farm at a fairly high rate of speed and Glen, the former pizza delivery guy whose main talent was navigating the city and not fighting, is leaning out the window and popping off headshots using a shotgun.

 

There was one realistic scene in the 2nd episode though. When Rick was inside the tank and he shot the zombified soldier, he was basically deaf for a few minutes which is what you'd expect if someone were to fire a gun as big as his Colt Python in an enclosed space.

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All those movies about how wrong it is to keep wild animals captive.

 

Which usually feature captive animals in the lead roles.

 

Granted, they did try to free, erm, free willy after filming was done, but still. The damage was done by that point. Just seems a bit hypocritical.

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Don't start me on Blackfish being used to decry all zoos and aquariaums as evil.

 

my Brother-in-law is about as super Vegan-hippie-love all animals-everything about the meat industry is super evil as one can get.

 

He works at an aquarium and knows full well now many species zoos and such have saved, just because SeaWorld likes to make a buck off jumping whales.

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Oh man, Walking Dead is the absolute worst. They have literally spent entire seasons telling us the reason nothing is happening is because everyone is too fucking useless to fight effectively, but as soon as a zombie shows up, everyone is suddenly Annie Oakley, pulling off trick shots and shit.

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Face/Off

Castor Troy is at the bad guy hideout. SWAT team comes right thru the windows and ceiling. Gina Gershon wants to keep her son from getting scared by all the gunfire and carnage, so she puts headphones on him, playing some song like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" or some shit. Presumably, the volume of said song is louder than the gunfire.

The threshold for pain from extremes in volume is around 140 decibels. Gunfire from most guns is in the 150-160db range. Why is the kid not screaming his head off as his brain is liquified by the last song he'll ever hear?

So Gina Gershon is the world's worst mother.

It's a stretch, but I can buy that the headphones are acting like earmuffs and helping to muffle the sound of the gunshots.  There's no reason the song has to be THAT loud, it's just artistic contrivance to cut out all the other diegetic sound effects and crank the volume of the song way way up.  (And there's worse stuff in that scene to complain about, like how the movie kinda presents the innocent cops doing their jobs as faceless villainous henchmen, or Nic Cage's total bullshit grabbing-hold-of-a-ledge-at-the-last-second when he and Pollux fall through the skylight.)  

 

 

Oh, man. THE WALKING DEAD is the worst ever when it comes to all that headshot bullshit. People are constantly running around, firing wild, clearly unaimed shots and scoring headshot after headshot.

Zombies are absurdly easy to kill on that show. You have to be a fucking idiot to get killed.

 

I think it was really the Dawn of the Dead remake which started that trend, along with so many other modern zombie cliches.  There's tons of moments in that show where completely untrained characters are easily scoring impossible headshots... with pistols... one-handed... while running... away from zombies which are crazy-fast moving targets.  

 

As for the fearless undead killers thing goes, yeah, it escapes me how normal people suddenly develop combat training and steely reserve in the face of the zombie horde.   When the shit goes down, no one pisses their pants in fear and never miss a headshot.

The GREAT zombie movies address that all the time.  Remember the original Dawn of the Dead, where it takes the helicopter pilot forever to get any good with guns and he's constantly missing shots, to the disdain of his SWAT-team comrades.  Or Shaun of the Dead, when never-touched-a-gun-before nerdy Englishman Sean can't hit jack shit even when he's shooting at stationary targets with a rifle at close range.  

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Found myself thinking this during the show Parenthood:

 

Shows with characters that don't make much money (i.e. Sarah Braverman), yet somehow never wear the same clothes twice and always seem to have something fashionable and dressy to wear for special occasions, even after their frumpy wardrobe is highlighted during the show.

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Found myself thinking this during the show Parenthood:

 

Shows with characters that don't make much money (i.e. Sarah Braverman), yet somehow never wear the same clothes twice and always seem to have something fashionable and dressy to wear for special occasions, even after their frumpy wardrobe is highlighted during the show.

 

 

I use to wonder the same thing about the Bundys. Al made shit for money,but Kelly and Bud always had whatever the latest style was.

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Found myself thinking this during the show Parenthood:

 

Shows with characters that don't make much money (i.e. Sarah Braverman), yet somehow never wear the same clothes twice and always seem to have something fashionable and dressy to wear for special occasions, even after their frumpy wardrobe is highlighted during the show.

 

 

I use to wonder the same thing about the Bundys. Al made shit for money,but Kelly and Bud always had whatever the latest style was.

 

Yet another point in favor of Roseanne.  That show didn't pull nonsense like this.  Dan wore the same stuff all the time.  And Roseanne and the kids dressed like they shopped at Wal-Mart.  Very realistic.

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Found myself thinking this during the show Parenthood:

 

Shows with characters that don't make much money (i.e. Sarah Braverman), yet somehow never wear the same clothes twice and always seem to have something fashionable and dressy to wear for special occasions, even after their frumpy wardrobe is highlighted during the show.

 

 

I use to wonder the same thing about the Bundys. Al made shit for money,but Kelly and Bud always had whatever the latest style was.

 

Yet another point in favor of Roseanne.  That show didn't pull nonsense like this.  Dan wore the same stuff all the time.  And Roseanne and the kids dressed like they shopped at Wal-Mart.  Very realistic.

 

 

Really? Because they seemed to be made of money when it came time for Halloween.  Unless that's just what they spent what little money they had on.

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Really? Because they seemed to be made of money when it came time for Halloween.  Unless that's just what they spent what little money they had on.

 

You could argue that was the only thing they spent money on - which, in the context of the show, it was - and also that they had built up a supply of that stuff over the years.

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The Bundys thing is easy. They were dead broke BECAUSE Al made shit for money at the shoe store and what little he did have was blown through by Peg and Kelly. Plus, at one time Kelly had a part time job. A couple of them.  Bud usually had a job too. Kids often buy stupid shit instead of stuff they need. I knew kids who grew up in the projects and they would have Nikes or a nice stereo system but fuck if you could find food in the fridge.

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Found myself thinking this during the show Parenthood:

 

Shows with characters that don't make much money (i.e. Sarah Braverman), yet somehow never wear the same clothes twice and always seem to have something fashionable and dressy to wear for special occasions, even after their frumpy wardrobe is highlighted during the show.

 

 

The opposite used to bug me on Veronica Mars.  Although I intellectually understand why (struggling show on a struggling network) it was always hilarious that Logan (son of action movie star Aaron Echols who makes 20 million a picture) and Duncan (son of Jake Kane, owner of the computer company that created streaming video, which was so successful that Jake became a billionaire, and everyone that worked for Kane Software, right down to the secretarial pool, became millionaires over night on the IPO) seemed to own, combined, about 5 shirts.

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I do think one major issue with Dollhouse was that the premise was just too absurd: Like, if you need a top notch hostage negotiator or a brain surgeon or bodyguard or whatever wouldn't you just, you know, get actual people instead of brainwashed clones that could go into meltdown at any moment?  Stuff goes wrong with technology all the time (and on the show, it frequently did), it's far too big a risk to take.

 

The prostitution aspect of it was a bit easier to buy, but even then. To spend an absurd amount of money because the woman/man in question feels more "real" (even though it's not) seems so much bother to go to.

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I think the premise came out of Whedon getting drunk and hubristic, taking his 'Empower people thought of as victims' thing to an illogical extreme, and identifying prostitutes as a downtrodden group. He pitches it as a barely thought out idea to Fox on the assumption they'd turn it down (but keeping himself on their radar, so to speak), and then the network thinks "We can cast loads of really hot chicks", sees dollar signs all over it, and tells him to actually make the show.

 

That or it was just his version of Stan Lee deciding "Well, everyone hates layabout rich kids, everyone hates arms dealers, everyone hates womanising playboys, so I'll make a hero who is a playboy rich kids arms dealer, and they'll all love him".

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I found Dollhouse to be pretty misogynistic and not in a "well, it's meant to be" type of way, just genuinely creepy at points. The treatment of the Sierra character in particular. The girl was literally getting raped every other week and rather than dealing with it in any meaningful way, they just had her kill the guy and it was shrugged off after that.

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